Google Play store opens paid apps for Indian Developers!

This is really great news for thousands of Indian Android developers. According to the reports, Indian developers are now allowed to publish paid Android apps on Google Play store. Till now Indian developers had to rely on advertising to generate revenue from their apps.

Till recent times, developers needed to have a bank account in either US, UK and select few countries which would be linked with their play store account.

Google has not yet announced this publicly, however, Google has listed India as one of 32 countries where developers can register as Google Checkout merchants and sell paid applications on Google Play store.

Although, Indians have been allowed to open a Google Checkout Merchant account, they will not be able to use all the services that Google checkout offers. Indians can use the account only to sell apps on Google Appstore. They cannot use Google Checkout account to sell products on any other website. That is allowed for users in US and UK only.

How does it work?

We personally tried creating an account, but looks like Google is still in the process of opening it up slowly, as we were not able to create an account. I guess this should get resolved in next few days. According to their support pages, Developers will have to first create a developer account with Google play.

They will have to pay USD 25 and accept Google’s developer distribution agreement. Currently Debit cards from India are not accepted, so they will have to use Credit cards. Developer will have then create a Google Checkout account with same email ID. You can link the account from Edit profile page.

With Google Checkout account you can use your Indian Bank Debit Card and also add your bank account, which will receive payments for apps sold on Google Play store.

This is surely a great news and I think this will boost participation from Indian developers who will now have a new drive to develop apps they can monetize.

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin and Facebook.Arun’s Google+ Profile

[…] development has been talks for couple of months now. Few days back, India was added in the list of countries that could sell apps, but then it was suddenly removed. I had personally tried registering the […]

Finally a good news from Google for the Indian app developers, thanks for updating this information I was still not aware about and yes it really matters to me because I’m planning to launch a paid app very soon.